Chapter 6
Dodie
I could hear Violet’s voice downstairs in the kitchen, her tone low and tight with concern.
She was on the phone with her daughter. Yes, I’m here.
Call if there’s an emergency. No, I don’t know how long I’ll be here.
I’ll call you again soon. I stretched my legs out on my childhood bed and stared at the ceiling, listening.
Violet sounded so parental. When had my sister become a parent?
Eventually, she hung up. Water ran in the hallway bathroom and a toilet flushed.
Vail’s heavy footsteps pounded down the stairs.
If I had to guess, I’d say he was going to the living room to see if he could get a signal through the rabbit ears on the TV.
More steps on the stairs, then a drawer opened and closed in Violet’s room as she put her clothes in her old dresser.
I absorbed it for a moment, the sounds of my siblings in the house.
In my life in a tiny New York apartment, I was used to the sounds of people all around me, but these weren’t strangers.
I knew that Violet was likely brushing her hair right now, wrestling its thick length back into a fresh ponytail.
I knew that Vail had left a mess of splashes on the bathroom counter.
I also knew that in ten minutes, he’d have the TV working. Vail was good with technical things.
We had no plan here, because what’s the plan, really, when you’ve come to find your long-dead brother?
No one makes a plan for that. We weren’t children anymore, and we’d never been happy in this house except when we were with Ben.
And yet I felt something shift inside me, subtly moving behind my rib cage as I breathed the dusty old air of this house and stared at the flowered wallpaper of my childhood room.
This place was familiar, and except for the dust, it felt more and more like I’d never left.
Time bent in and touched itself, like a circle.
The house knew me. It knew my strangeness.
I sat up, ignoring how my feet had rumpled the bedspread, and looked at the wall, sighing.
I’d been—what—fourteen when I was last here?
A juvenile idiot. I’d liked to cut photos from magazines back then and pin them to my bedroom wall.
The magazines were shoplifted, because our parents never gave us any money and I was very good at stealing in those days.
A skill I had let rust with disuse over the years.
The photos were still there, the last ones I’d had up when we left the house for good.
What did young Dodie like to pin to her walls?
No handsome movie stars or singers. There was an ad for Pond’s cold cream, another for Camel cigarettes.
A tourism ad for St. Maarten, featuring a photo of a beautiful beach.
A photo of a Christmas tree—not ours, of course—with presents under it.
A catalog page featuring a pair of shoes that I probably wanted to either buy or steal.
The pictures on my walls had changed constantly, an endless gallery of things I wanted, thought I wanted, or simply liked looking at.
When I stopped wanting something, I threw the photo of it away.
In third grade, I’d been invited to a birthday party, one of the few times such a thing had happened.
I’d gone, saddled with a shiny wrapped gift that I’d had to beg my mother to buy, and as I passed by the formal sitting room at the birthday girl’s house, I’d spotted a framed family photo on a side table.
It was of two parents and three children on a ski hill, posing with wide smiles, their cheeks a healthy blush of red.
I’d dutifully played the silly birthday party games, waiting for my chance.
At a moment when the cake had come out and no one was paying attention to me, I’d murmured about going to the bathroom and slipped down the hall to the sitting room.
Stealthily, I’d taken the framed photo from its place and slid it into my coat, which was hanging from a hook by the front door.
At the end of the party, I’d walked out with the photo with no one the wiser.
I’d put the picture on my dresser. It cheered me in a way I couldn’t explain to see those five strangers smiling at me every morning and night.
I didn’t pretend they were my family—I no longer even remembered the people’s names—but the photo gave me comfort.
We had no family photos of our own, so the picture of another family was a reminder that this life somehow existed, that there were people who lived like this, took pictures like this.
Eventually, my mother noticed the photo. She lost her temper at my theft, screamed at me, then threw the picture away. Her reaction was really quite satisfying. Worth it, even though I had to sacrifice the picture.
Now I opened my dresser drawers and rifled through the old T-shirts, the now-tiny underpants.
An early bra, two soft triangles of embarrassed cotton.
I’d left these behind because they were too small for me even then, and I couldn’t wear them anymore.
In the end, we’d lasted two years in this house after Ben vanished before Mom couldn’t take it anymore and we left in a hurry, like thieves.
I found a crusted mascara, a half-used lipstick I’d probably swiped from Violet. Except for the odd pictures on the wall, this was the room of any sad girl in a bad movie.
From under the bed came a soft sound, a faint thump. The sound of something rolling, then stopping.
My hand stilled in the drawer. I closed my eyes as my breath tightened in my throat.
For a second I could smell dampness, mold, and dirty water.
A rotten smell that permeated my nose and went all the way up into my skull.
I could taste the damp in the back of my throat, taste the cold as the water rushed up, rising and inexorable, ready to pull me into its filthy depths, to pull me under and stop my breath—
From downstairs came the shrill sound of music from the TV, blasting through the house. The opening of the local news. Vail had gotten the TV working. The sound receded as he turned the volume down.
I opened my eyes. There was no water, but the smell—I could swear I smelled it. Taste its foulness in the back of my throat.
I could go downstairs and watch the news with my brother. Or I could stay here and look under the bed.
I wasn’t going to look under the bed.
I wasn’t going downstairs, either. Instead, I walked to the bed, pulled the covers back, and got in, fully clothed.
I slid under the cool, musty sheets and lay my head on the pillow.
Everyone knew, because it was a law of the universe, that whatever was under the bed couldn’t get me here.
It had no power. This was the only place I was safe.
For all my childhood, this had been the only place I was safe.
As a newscaster’s voice rang downstairs in the living room, I pulled the blankets over my head, turned over, and closed my eyes.